McGregor's Boy
by theUglySpirit
Summary: A short history of the Valance family, as told by Cherry. ONE SHOT.


SE Hinton owns The Outsiders. I'm trespassing on her playground.

**McGregor's Boy**

After "the incident", it took her almost another full year to die. My grandmother- the Follies girl, the Gay '90s girl, the starlet come to earth in Tulsa- never fully found her way back from that bus station, although the Salvation Army officer brought her to our doorstep unharmed. She spent day after day looking through the drawers in the kitchen (and driving the kitchen staff batty while she did it) looking for a bus ticket that she had no money of her own to purchase. She insisted her manager was waiting for her in New York.

No amount of logic could dissuade her: not the simple fact that such a ticket did not exist or that her manager had been fired for his cocaine misuse when the talkies came about and ruined both her career and his; not the exasperated and cruel reminder that she was 80 years old and no longer wanted on stage or screen.

"Mother, look in the mirror," my brother would sometimes say. "Christ, look at you."

I didn't have the heart to put it like that. Sometimes I would take her to the drawing room and leaf through the books, feigning an attempt to find the ticket between the pages. It would occupy her for hours, and it gave me a chance to read my father's and grandfather's books.

The grandfather who owned the books and the drawing room and the house that held them was not the father or her first children. He was my grandfather, and the man many accused her of killing with syphilis. That she never showed any symptoms of the disease herself, other than the loss of her senses, did nothing to silence the rumor mills. My grandfather was a good, well-born Tulsa man. He must have got it from her and not from some wandering French girl in during the Great War.

My grandmother was not the only person in Tulsa immune to logic.

She was older when she had her family with my grandfather, but they were her second tribe. The first son was born to her in 1905 when she was not quite twenty. His father was unknown, and the manager signed the birth certificate. She claimed, although her mind was addled by the time I knew her, that she never "had relations with that man"- that he was more of a strict, somewhat cold father figure to her. It was self-preservation that made him sign the birth certificate. She'd never had the career she did with a bastard child.

She and her manager claimed a Las Vegas wedding and subsequent Mexican divorce. I've never found proof on paper of either. It was enough for the studios to hear of it, though, when she showed up in Los Angeles with a baby in her arms. The baby's name was McGregor and he followed her everywhere- even to Tulsa- but at a distance. He has the manager's last name.

She married my grandfather in 1915 when she was thirty and he was twenty-four. She was still an actress then, and still a beauty, and was able to lie her way around the age difference where his family was concerned. Her beauty was enough for my grandfather. To hear her tell it, beauty was enough to set him wandering in any number of directions. Still, she took the blame for the disease that crippled him. By the time he passed, it hardly mattered anymore. She took the blame for everything, and didn't seem to care. She'd lost everything that made her long ago.

"Don't sleep around, Sheryl," she would tell me, and I would say nothing because what do you say to that?

"Don't break boy's hearts," she would also sometimes say, but would never explain the circumstances under which she learned that lesson. I can only assume she was referring to the man who fathered McGregor.

"Don't look at me like that. You remind me of your mother when you stare," she'd say. "You mother is such a plain woman. She looks vacant. You look just like her when you stare. Smile or scowl or cross your eyes or something."

My grandmother never approved of my mother, and she barely tolerated me. Not until she got older and didn't have a choice. I was the only one who would let her canvas the books in the drawing room looking for that ticket.

Maybe it was that my father and my mother also neglected one of her choice piece of advice: "don't have children young". They were eighteen when they were married and I was born. It was probably a shotgun wedding, although my mother's family prefers threat of lawsuit to any kind of weaponry. I was born in 1948, so there was no draft to hold over my father's head. Most likely, they said that someone would cry "rape", if not my mother than some other girl.

"You can pay people and they'll do anything," my grandmother said.

She died in 1965, and left an obituary full of holes. She was born in Oklahoma Territory in 1885 in the town of Ada. The only people who lived in Ada at the time were Indians, but the obituary didn't say that outright. A reader familiar with the geography might have deduced, but no one said it aloud.

_Frances Mathilde Colter- Valance, known to her closest friends as Francine, was born in Ada, Oklahoma Territory in 1895. She was renowned for her beauty and known as the Star Fell to Earth in Oklahoma. She was discovered in 1901, and left the Territory for the lights of Broadway. In 1914, she met the love of her life Tyrone Valance, and returned to the state of her birth to make her home in Tulsa. She was active in the Ladies Auxilliary and an annual attendant of the Oil Boom Ball…_

Francine was the mother- it went on to say- of Margaret, Melissa and Donald, and grandmother to six. The obituary did not mention McGregor, a point he raised when he showed himself at her funeral. It was the first time I'd seen him. I made a note of him- committed it to mind like a photograph- should I ever meet him again. From what I heard from the ladies in the cloakroom later on, I would have to be trolling in the gutter if I wanted to run into McGregor. It didn't take a dive that deep, however, to meet his son- my cousin, Tim.

* * *

I could barely keep my mind on what Ponyboy Curtis was telling me as we waited in line at the drive-in: something about his good-looking brother and a horse. He sure thought highly of his brother. I kept my ears trained on him just enough that I could look serious or dreamy at the appropriate marks in his story. It wasn't hard. I only had to watch his face. In my head, I was cursing Dallas Winston because it was him that brought Tim Shepard around.

So Tim Shepard had a car- he'd at least climbed that far up the societal ladder. He no longer had tires for it, at least not any that held air, and that was his biggest concern of late. So said Two-Bit when he came upon us at the drive-in.

I shut my mouth hard, stared ahead at the flickering screen, and didn't say a word. In my head, I was praying for him not to come looking for us. I suggested Ponyboy and I get a Coke. It was light in the concession stand, but the crowd was thick. Tim might miss us if he walked by.

Ponyboy told me his story, and I told him mine- one of them anyway. Ponyboy's story only went back as long as he had memory for, so I kept mine to a similar span of time. My story- stories of families like mine- went back years further, though- all the way back to when my grandmother had a baby named McGregor Shepard and then tried to cut him loose in New York.

Is it called "being discovered" if it's for the second time? She was discovered twice: the second time by a movie executive from one of the big studios in California. She left her baby McGregor with his father, the manager named Shepard in New York. She took the train with a new manager- maybe a man who had syphilis- and moved to an apartment in Los Angeles with three other girls owned by the studio. I mean, both: the studio owned both the apartment and the girls.

Mr. Shepard and the baby found her, though. He left the baby the first time he came to see her. He brought a signed paper saying that she was still under contract with him. She said that their divorce changed all that, but- as I've said- no one could produce proof of a marriage or a divorce.

My grandmother was pretty in a valuable sort of way, so the studio offered to by Shepard out. In fact, he took the money. He went away, back to New York, but returned with the baby. Whenever she tried to make a move, whenever she brought down a significant amount of cash, there he was: baby in arms, threatening to ruin her unless she paid up.

She grew to hate them both. Or maybe she just turned hateful. I've never had one of my own, but I don't understand how someone could hate their own child. McGregor certainly felt her distain: by the time he was an adult, all she was to him was a payday. He was happy to stay away- happy to keep his family at a distance as well- as long as he kept getting paid.

When McGregor got older and took to lying in gutters, his common-law wife took up the gauntlet. She had my grandmother's grandchildren to support, she said.

"Let her shout it from the roof-tops then," my father shouted. I overheard him in the drawing room when one of his sisters came to him with the news. "This isn't 1930, and it isn't even her money anymore. It's father's money, and it's oil money. That doesn't go away like dew-drop skin and perky tits."

"Donnie," my Aunt Margaret gasped. Apparently, it had never dawned on that her mother once had perky tits.

My Aunt Melissa was more business-minded. "That's right, Donald. It's oil money, and it doesn't go away. Her movie money is gone, but father's money is still making money of its own. She's inherited everything of father's. It's hers. She can keep paying off her bastard and all of his little bastards for the rest of her life."

I didn't hear my father's reply. Most likely, there wasn't one. At that point, he probably went deep into thought, as he often did. He was silent for a long time. Margaret and Melissa went home. My father thought some more, and then he called his lawyer.

It was around that time that family secrets that I've never overheard before began to come to light: syphilis and cocaine. A baby in New York, a Mexican divorce- a lifetime of bad decisions and a degenerating mind to show for it. She was slipping. She was incompetent. Someone needed to be declared a guardian of all that money in her stead.

Of course, that was my father. He probably drove her to the bus station himself. He probably planted the story in her head, and then planted her on the platform with her mission: to search for that ticket. Why she played along, I will never understand. She played the role long after the papers were signed and McGregor and his children were written off. She kept looking until the day she died, and she never found it.

Nor did I, but I did find the receipts after she died. I don't know why I kept looking, but I did- after her funeral. The drawing room was quiet that day. It was an eery quiet. I wasn't raised to be religious or superstitious- in my father's mind they were one in the same. Yet, that day I felt as though I was being watched in the drawing room. Maybe I was being guided.

The receipt was written by the family lawyer and signed by my grandmother. It was buried in her private ledger in amongst receipts for furs, a monthly hair appointment and to Mr. Simon- that man who supplied her with "something for the pain" in her later years.

It was a receipt for two bus tickets- one for an adult and one for a child. She had long-since married my grandfather by the time she made the purchase. My father and my aunt Margaret had been born. She brought them back to her, paid for their passage when she could've left them to survive on their own in Los Angeles.

I can only assume that, in the dementia of her later years, she confused the situation somehow: somewhere between our house and the bus station "meeting them" became "going to them". Los Angeles became New York. Whatever the case, she was reliving a day long ago when she was reunited with her manager Shepard and her oldest son. Who knows how often she visited them without our knowledge until Mr. Shepard's death. After that, her relationship with McGregor Shepard improved and then became strained. The ledger book told the story.

"What's a nice, smart kid like you running around with trash like that for?" I asked Ponyboy Curtis that night at the drive-in. His answer hardly satisfied me. He described a sameness, the connection created by mutual poverty.

I shared none of that with my cousin Tim, and yet the mere mention of his name was enough to make me go cold inside with fear, but not the kind of fear that he instilled in the other greasers. He could render them a beating, but he could take everything away from me.


End file.
